Name: Former PhD student jailed for at least 24 years for raping women in London and China | BBC News
Uploaded: 2025-06-19T16:49:17.000Z
Duration: 5 min 56 s
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Transition words & phrases

I want to bring you up to date with some news from the courts here in London, because we are hearing that a former PhD student who raped 10 women in London and China has been jailed for life with a minimum term of 24 years.

Participle clauses

This is Junhao Zhao, so taking into account the number of days he has been on remand, he faces almost 23 years before he can be considered for parole.

Adverbs of degree

In the judge's comments, she called him a highly manipulative young man.

She said the women were simply pieces in an elaborate game for one, and she said he had no understanding of the meaning of consent.

The judge said there is a high level of danger because of your distorted thinking.

His desire to assert power and control meant he was a risk for an indefinite period, the judge said in the sentencing remarks.

So just to bring you the headline from that, a Chinese former PhD student, Junhao Zhao, has been sentenced to life with a minimum term of 24 years for raping 10 women in London and in China.

And of course, we'll bring you more details on that court case, that judgment at the Inner London Crown Court from our reporters as we get them.

Now, let's look further at the attack that saw...

I'm told actually we can go to our correspondent, Daniel Sanford, who's been following this case in court.

Daniel, I mentioned just a few of the judge's remarks in sentencing.

Yes, sorry, Anita, it took a little bit of while to get through security to get out here to talk to you.

Judge Rosina Cottage was the trial judge who presided over the trial earlier in the year and sat through those really heart-rending videos of women being raped.

Some of them women that the police had managed to identify, many of them women that the police had never managed to identify.

And actually, in the intervening months, one of the women who was unidentified at the time of the trial and was seen being raped at an unknown location in China had actually come forward to the police and her victim impact statement was able to be read to the judge today to outline the huge effect it had on her to have been drugged by Zhen Haozhou and raped by him, how she afterwards felt that she had to go and have treatment for AIDS in case she contracted HIV during the rape because Zhen Haozhou never used condoms during any of these rapes.

This morning was taken up with hearing from her victim personal statement but also from the victim personal statements from the two other women that Zhen Haozhou had raped that had been identified.

They were women who had been raped in London, women that had got to know Zhen Haozhou socially, he sort of lured them in to a trap effectively and had then drugged them, almost certainly with GHB and had then raped them and in one case filmed the rape, in another case filmed the build-up to the rape and then taken pictures of her after the rape and they were really heart-rending accounts by those women of how they now suffer from lots of anxiety, how they struggle to sleep, how they'll never be able to forgive him and how they believe that Zhen Haozhou will remain a danger to society forever and that he should never be released.

Five members of the jury who sat in that trial in February and March came back today for the sentencing.

They are jurors that have seen things that most jurors don't have to see, just horrendous pictures of women being raped.

So, Rosina Kochich, Casey, the judge, thanked them for coming back for the sentencing today and then she went through briefly, in heart-rending detail, each of the rapes that had been witnessed on video because of course almost all of the evidence in this trial was videos of rapes and then the two accounts from the women who had been identified and she said that she had no doubt that he would remain a danger to people in society and so she said that the sentence inevitably had to be a life sentence and when she was considering the minimum time before he could be released from prison, Rosina Kochich, Casey, said that she's set that minimum term as 24 years, though because he had spent some time in prison awaiting trial, that was reduced to 22 years, 227 days, but a sentence, essentially, Jeanne Harzau has been sentenced to a life sentence with 24 years in prison for 11 rapes of 10 different women, three of whom have now been identified, but I should say that this case doesn't end there because police have continued to go through all of the evidence that they've gathered from Jeanne Harzau's devices.

They believe there could be 50 or more other victims and so far 24 more women have come forward since the trial to say that they may have been either sexually assaulted or raped by Jeanne Harzau.